Video Game Review

Star Fox (2026)

Nintendo's Star Fox 64 remake fills the gap left by the lost art of the manual, and at $50 it's the most welcoming the series has ever been.

There is a small ritual that modern gaming has quietly retired, and most people did not notice it leave. You used to buy a game, get in the back seat of the car, and read the manual on the drive home, poring over the character bios and the move lists and the descriptions of power-ups you had not yet seen, building the whole world in your head before the disc ever spun. That booklet was not just instructions; it was the on-ramp, the thing that taught you who these people were and how their world worked, and its disappearance left a gap in how games introduce themselves. The best remakes understand that the gap has to be filled by something, and the new Star Fox, the second time Nintendo has opened a console generation by remaking both Ocarina of Time and Star Fox 64, fills it so gracefully that it becomes the strongest argument for why this remake needed to exist at all.

For the uninitiated, and this remake was played by exactly that (someone who came to the series fresh and went back to Star Fox 64 on Nintendo Switch Online first to understand the baseline) Star Fox is a rail shooter. You pilot the Arwing through a branching campaign across the planets of the Lylat System, automatically pushed forward through each level while you shoot enemies, dodge debris, and deflect incoming fire with a well-timed barrel roll, all in service of stopping the evil scientist Andross. Developed by Velan Studios for the Switch 2, it keeps the bones of the 1997 original intact while layering on the things the era now expects: full voice acting, an orchestral score, cinematic cutscenes, and online multiplayer.

The original Star Fox 64 did its onboarding through gameplay, the iconic moment where Peppy barks "Do a barrel roll" and teaches you a mechanic mid-mission, and that instinct is alive and well here in a robust tutorial that guides you through flight and combat without condescending to you. This matters more than it might sound, because so many retro games on the Switch Online service are quietly hard to approach now, throwing you in with no manual and no in-game teaching and trusting you to suss out the controls. A modern player picking up the original Pokemon Red and Blue can get stuck simply because the game never tells you where to go. Star Fox solves that problem cleanly, and the result is a remake that is welcoming in a way the original, for all its charms, no longer is.

The added story depth does real work too. The voice acting gives these characters an intentionality they never had in the cartoonish original, a sense that they exist and want things rather than simply reciting mission barks. Falco carries a Han Solo cockiness, the kind that pushes a line and then realizes it has pushed too far and walks it back. Slippy lands as the stereotypical eighties Amblin tech kid, the brainy sidekick from every family adventure movie of that decade. And Fox himself plays like a shonen anime protagonist, earnest and driven, the lead of his own coming-of-age arc. None of these are deep characterizations, but they are specific ones, and specificity is exactly what turns a roster of video-game mascots into a crew you care about flying with.

It looks the part, too. The game runs smoothly and every environment is rendered beautifully, the burning cityscapes and the vast space battles given a level of detail the Nintendo 64 could only gesture at, and the visual overhaul is the single most immediately striking upgrade. The one sour note is the same one the series has been getting memed over for decades: the Landmaster tank sections are still a slog. Even modernized, the tank handles tightly and never moves quite as fluidly as you want it to, and it remains the stretch of the game you endure rather than enjoy. It is a small blemish on an otherwise gorgeous package, and a faithful one, since complaining about the tank level is practically part of the Star Fox experience.

What seals the recommendation is the price, and this is where the game's modesty becomes a virtue. At fifty dollars digital, Star Fox arrives meaningfully cheaper than the seventy and eighty-dollar tags Nintendo and the wider industry have been attaching to first-party releases, and that restraint is honest about what the game is. The campaign is short and the additions, while real, are not voluminous. But there is replayability built in, the branching paths, the multiple difficulty modes, the medals to chase, and at fifty dollars the math works in a way it simply would not at eighty. In a year when GTA VI is asking eighty for the most anticipated game on earth, a polished, gorgeous, complete remake asking fifty feels almost quaint, and entirely fair.

Star Fox is the rare remake that justifies itself not by reinventing the original but by understanding precisely what a modern player needs to fall in love with it, the tutorial, the characterization, the cinematic frame, the fair price. It cannot teach you to read a manual in the back of your parents' car, because that era is gone, but it does the next best thing, which is build all of that wonder into the game itself. Play it on the Switch 2. It is well worth your time and your money, and it is the most welcoming front door this series has ever had.